Most of people and especially traveling businessmen or representatives prefer to dress their shirts when they have proper and nice appearance. Furthermore during traveling, official events or in other occasions people need fresh and nice ironed shirts. Normally people change and dress clean and ironed shirts very often due to dirt, food marks, water or rain drops, perspiration marks, dust etc. Normally there is no time and place to iron the shirt before dressing after it has been already taken out from the package.
Due to wrong or non-optimal packaging or pressure of other objects in the briefcase, suitcase, etc., the shirt becomes wrinkled, not straight, not flat and therefore it has improper appearance. Therefore people are looking for a method or way to pack and store their shirts in such a way that their appearance is not deteriorated by storing and it can be dressed without any additional preliminary treatment.
Another well known problem associated with shirts after they are folded and stored is the way of folding to optimal overall size, the positioning of sleeves in the folded condition and the most suitable way to iron collars and to keep them in proper shape.
Shirts are ironed flat and then folded afterwards. Ironing and folding can be done in accordance with various methods or steps and most of the people develop their own ideas and habits how to fold their garments.
When offered for sale the new shirts are supplied normally packed and folded with a sample flat piece of thick paper in the middle and a sheet of paper or plastics in the collar. This is a very simple shape and method for one time use. The papers are thrown away and not used anymore. They do not help during folding of shirts after ironing and have only limited function.
Shirts without ironing are hanged on the rack and not folded. The use of the present invention can solve the folding problem also in this case.
There are known various prior art devices for folding and storing of garments. In the U.S. Pat. No. 5,011,052 there is disclosed a folding device for apparel, which facilitates the folding of shirts or sweaters. The device consists of a flat base having plurality of creases to allow the operator to manipulate the shirt while folding thereof in various stages to achieve complete and proper folding. The creases are directed in horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions and the shirt should be folded along all of them, which render the device and use thereof somewhat complicate and unsuitable for folding the apparel into configuration suitable for storing in a small briefcase.
In the U.S. Pat. No. 5,154,329 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,174,479 there are described a configured shirt-shaper for folding shirts and a method for folding a shirt. The shaper is configured as a flat base member configured as a rectangular sheet with arm members extending from each upper corner area and a first and a second fold line extending longitudinally along one side and the other side to divide the base member into two substantially equal side sections and a mid-section. The shaper is provided only with longitudinal fold lines and its surface is not sufficient to fold the shirt also in transversal directions.
There are known also other shirt folding devices employing fold lines, however they always employ either solely longitudinal fold lines or in combination with the transversal fold lines and diagonal fold lines and none of them envisages a simple combination of longitudinal and transversal fold lines so as to fold the garment into compact configuration, which can be advantageously stored in folded wrinkle-free state which dimensions fit small briefcases usually used by traveling business people.